An archive of articles and listserve postings of interest, mostly posted without commentary, linked to commentary at the Education Notes Online blog. Note that I do not endorse the points of views of all articles, but post them for reference purposes.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

'Whatever the charter asks for, we're forced to give,' says Sandra Serrano, mother of Hannah, who's in the fourth grade at Public School 15. The school shares its building with PAVE Academy.

A simmering turf battle between a charter and a traditional public school sharing a Red Hook building is boiling over, with public school parents charging their kids are treated like second-class citizens.

Parents at Public School 15 say they're being squeezed out by PAVE Academy, which has asked to extend its stay in the Sullivan St. building despite promising to be out at the end of this year.

Deepening the rift are differences in the schools' styles and the challenges of operating apart, but under one roof.

PS 15 parents and teachers said their kids waste time traveling all the way around the school, forced to avoid hallways and a stairwell allocated to PAVE. Separate playground and mealtimes mean a constant scheduling shuffle.

Some parents say charter students are discouraged from even greeting PS 15 students and staff, creating an unfriendly atmosphere.

"They keep them away from these kids and act like they're diseased or something," said Maritza Delgado, the mother of a PS 15 third-grader. "It's like they're better than the kids who are already there."

PAVE founder Spencer Robertson denied that PAVE students are told not to speak to their PS 15 peers and said that both schools agreed on the division of space and schedules.

"We are separate schools that share the same building, and we run two entirely different programs," he said.

But the culture clash highlights the challenges of plunking a charter into established neighborhood schools - a growing practice that is sparking skirmishes in schools across the city.

Many PS 15 parents were angry that the school's band was forced to move its practice out of a specially built music room because it's sandwiched between two PAVE classrooms.

PAVE's freshly painted classrooms, shiny new tables and chairs and new electronic whiteboards do little to ease resentments.

PAVE parents said the style of the charter - where kids wear uniforms, march silently in the halls, and chant slogans - is misunderstood and that their kids are the ones having to compromise, given limited meal and gym times.

"It's not our choice that we're using their space," said Mercedes Jackson, 26, a PAVE parent and Red Hook resident. "It's just where we need to be."

Robertson said he'd signed a contract for a permanent site in Red Hook and was "optimistic" that he'd be able to move in by the 2012-2013 school year.

Department of Education spokeswoman Melody Meyer said an extension might be granted based on "whether there's enough space for both schools to operate successfully beyond the original agreement."

An additional class next year at PAVE, which now has about 130 students, would make the school 74% full with both schools, DOE estimates show.

After losing a computer lab, a science lab and space for enrichment, tutoring and special education programs, PS 15 parents argue they can't afford to give up more.

"Whatever the charter asks for, we're forced to give," said Sandra Serrano, the mother of a PS 15 fourth-grader. "I'm not opposed to [the charter], I'm just opposed to it in the school."

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

As an ESL teacher, I face challenges very different from those of my colleagues. For example, while some teachers are at their wits' end trying to get kids to quiet down, I might be begging newcomers to speak audibly - or making them repeat things 20 times until they can be heard.

But that's not always the case. For example, a few years back, I had half a dozen kids from the Dominican Republic who loved to speak. But they wanted to speak Spanish, and in my English classes, we speak only English.

It was hard to blame them. On the other side of our sheetrock wall was a Spanish teacher partial to choral repetition. Every time I reminded my kids of our English-only rule, we'd hear 34 voices chant in unison, "Como esta usted, Senor Mendez?" They thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

The half-rooms were designed to alleviate overcrowding. After we created them, the Education Department sent us hundreds of extra kids.

I've since been exiled to the trailers. Technically they're "transportables," but ours haven't gone anywhere since they arrived years ago. Our first trailers gave us four additional classrooms, designed to alleviate overcrowding.

After we got the trailers, the department sent us hundreds of extra kids. Our second bunch gave us four more classrooms, and the department sent us hundreds more extra kids. Our last principal declined further trailers. In fact, he had an athletic field built around them, precluding further construction in the trailer park. The department sent us hundreds of extra kids anyway.

We improvised new rooms. Some resembled bowling alleys. A colleague, the day before his retirement, brought a bowling ball and rolled it from one end of the room to the other. The department sent us hundreds of extra kids.

Space became truly scarce. I was assigned to a room the size of a small studio apartment. A dance class practiced outside, forcing us to close the door. Having no windows, the 17 students and I made the daily choice between air and quiet.

This year, to alleviate the overcrowding, we extended our class day to 13 periods. The department still sent us hundreds of extra kids. Our building, initially designed for 1,800 students, broke 4,700 this year.

Returning teachers struggle to handle up to 45 students at a time, leading to momentous battles over precious chairs. Students and teachers tear furiously down the hallways, shoving each other out of the way to make classes on time by any means necessary. A colleague of mine found herself teaching a gym class of 156 kids. By the time the period was over, she hadn't finished taking attendance. They've since added another teacher, and six kids, so she's now down to 81.

In the trailers, the floors are polished for the first time. But with swine flu looming large, the sinks barely work and there's not a bottle of Purell to be found anywhere.

To us, the experts at Tweed are like doctors who diagnose a disease, then inject the patient with more toxins just to make certain they're right. No one can criticize their diagnostic skills. But if anyone's due a malpractice suit, it's the Department of Education.

Sunday, September 27, 2009

The Charter Schools Gamble

Speculating on Education

"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.

Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?

It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."

So why charter schools?

According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."

Huh?

EPR, based in Kansas City, Missouri, consists of sixteen full-time employees. David Brain, President and CEO, says his favorite part of the job is: "solving problems and crafting a deal, and creating something really new." The deals that EPR crafts follow corporate policy: their tenants must sign a long-term mortgage or something called a triple-net lease where they (the tenants) pay "substantially all expenses associated with the operation and maintenance of the property." EPR’s charter schools have these triple-net leases. EPR is the landlord; the tenant pays for maintaining the buildings and running the classrooms.

In this case, the tenant is a charter-school operator called Imagine. Founded in 2004, it now runs 74 schools from New York to Arizona involving some 36,000 students. Imagine says its goal is “giving the families quality educational choice” by establishing “independently operated public schools.”

Charters are public schools in that the funding comes from state and local school taxes. Imagine gets a certain amount of money for each of its charter students based on the home district’s per-student expenses. The more kids Imagine enrolls, the more money it gets (and the less goes to traditional public schools.) Over the last few years, charters have been successfully attracting more and more students: in central Ohio, for example, Imagine’s budget doubled in 2005-06 and doubled again the next year.

The money pays for teachers, supplies, maintenance, etc. But the problem charter schools have is getting the capital to buy or lease buildings. The vice-president of policy for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools calls it “the biggest challenge.”

What Imagine did was start a real estate arm: Schoolhouse Finance LLC. In central Ohio, for example, this financial arm purchased a building for $1.5 million with a $4.6 million mortgage. But tying up their money in property ends up limiting how much charter schools can expand. So Imagine turned around and sold its buildings as part of a larger sale-lease transaction with a company called JER Investors Trust Inc. This brought in $5.6 million over Imagine’s original purchase price.

Imagine did a similar deal in Indiana, where its real estate arm made $2.6 million on an old YWCA it bought for $1.9 million. In fact, real estate plays a key role in Imagine’s charter school operations: its investments in buildings went from $19 million in 2005 to $297 million in 2008 -- suggesting that charter schools can turn the challenge of finding classrooms to their advantage.

But why does a company like JER think charter school buildings are a good investment?

JER’s founder, Joe Robert, made his killing in the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980's. Through his connections with the Federal Savings and Loan Association, Robert was awarded the largest contract ever at the time ($120 million in assets) to manage and sell the government’s “troubled” properties. He cleaned up, moving from there to handling assets for himself and other investors. By 1986, he was managing a portfolio worth some $7.5 billion.

Soon, JER was working with Goldman Sachs and the Blackstone Group. Its profits only increased with the various mortgage and investment arrangements that helped create the real estate bubble. As a Washington Post reporter put it, "In those days … it was not unusual for Robert to double and triple his money, sometimes within a matter of months."

A high-flying investor, then, who spent some $77.5 million buying into charter schools. A November 2008 story from Las Vegas helps explain why.

Imagine ran a Nevada school called the 100 Academy of Excellence, which -- based on the local per-student cost -- received about $3 million from the state each year. Half of that, the story reports, went to running the school and half went back to the operator, Imagine. Of the $1.5 million Imagine got, it paid almost all of it -- $1.4 million -- to Joe Robert’s company to cover its lease.

That’s an enormous percentage of your budget to pay for classrooms. (And Imagine has high leases in other schools, like Fort Wayne’s MASTer Academy.) But Imagine is a start-up company. It needs classrooms to draw students -- to expand its brand name until it can become truly profitable.

Meanwhile, it added up to a first-rate investment for JER. The tenant (Imagine) had a dependable source of income through school taxes – and, in the Nevada case, was willing to use most of its revenue to pay the lease. The only catch in the formula is the charter has to educate its students on about half what the state spends per-student.

Imagine makes clear on its website how it expects to deal with this. The corporation demands what it calls “economic sustainability” from all its schools. “Each school must spend less each year on school operations than it receives in revenue from the government and other sources.”

But if the district determines how much it costs to educate a child – and sends money to Imagine based on that formula -- how can the charter school do it for less? In the case of the 100 Academy of Excellence, the principal told a state official that money was saved by letting go veteran (read expensive) teachers and increasing class size (read cost saving).

That guaranteed that the rent got paid. But it didn’t guarantee the quality of the education. 2006-07 test results from the 100 Academy of Excellence fell below national standards and put it on the state’s “Watch List” for failing schools.

The academy’s landlord, JER, didn’t need to bother about such matters. Or about Imagine’s profitability. In fact, though Imagine brought in $131 million in the 2006-07 school year, it ended up losing $2.3 million. But JER hadn’t bought Imagine; it had bought the real estate: the school buildings with Imagine as the tenant. As long as the tenant lived up to its lease, JER had a sweet deal.

It might have continued, except the real estate bubble burst. In two years, JER’s publicly traded stock went from $23 a share to zero – and was “delisted” from the New York Stock Exchange. Robert started selling off his assets, including the charter school buildings. That’s when Entertainment Properties stepped in, buying the properties complete with triple-net leases.

“The charter public schools,” says EPR’s David Brain, “offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It’s a very desirable equation.”

So it has been. Nationally, the number of students choosing charter schools has quadrupled in the last decade. In EPR’s words, “people chose to visit them” -- just like mega-theaters. That will continue as long as parents are disappointed in traditional public schools, and operators like Imagine successfully market their brand of “quality” education.

But what if charters don’t provide better test results (as some recent studies have shown)? What if families decide they don’t offer a better choice? Then the numbers will decrease, and the per-student revenue stream will start to dry up.

Other scenarios could also affect revenue. What if tax-payers revolt against their money being used to make a profit for private companies? What if the economy doesn’t recover quickly? Or, using less drastic possibilities, what if the states’ educational funds continue to be strapped: what a director of the National Education Association calls the current “lack of funds overall”? Even with the current stimulus money, many school districts are having to tighten their budgets. And that stimulus money will soon disappear.

It’s easy to imagine what happens once charters fail or start to shrink. The flow reverses: public schools are flooded with returning students. But now veteran teachers have been driven from the system. Young educators working with over-sized charter classes have burnt out. Plus, having shrunk their physical operation, public schools will suddenly have to find classroom space.

If the recent failure of the economy has taught us anything, it’s that all investment is speculation. We’ve seen the supposedly guaranteed income of everything from retirement funds to home prices collapse. In the face of these kinds of reversals, investors like EPR could probably recoup some of their losses (as JER did) by selling off their school buildings.

But should the speculation that is charter schools fail, where does that leave the nation’s educational system? And our kids?

Daniel Wolff lives in Nyack, N.Y. His newest book is How Lincoln Learned to Read. His other books include "4th of July/Asbury Park: A History of the Promised Land." He is a co-producer of the forthcoming Jonathan Demme documentary about New Orleans, "Right to Return." He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net

None of this will likely strike you as particularly new, but it might be good to have a bunch of myths lined up and debunked all in one place.

The schools were to blame for letting the Russians get into space first. Granddaddy of all slanders and a great illustration of the absolute nuttiness with which people talk about education.

Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth, launched on October 4, 1957. On September 20, 1956, Werner von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched a 4-stage Jupiter C rocket from Cape Canaveral. After the first 3 stages fired, the rocket was 832 miles in the air and traveling at 13,000 miles an hour. The 4th stage could have easily bumped something into orbit. The 4th stage was filled with sand. There were a number of reasons for this including the fact that the Eisenhower administration was determined to keep its weapons rocket program and its space exploration project separate and von Braun's rocket was clearly a weapon. Its primary intent was to incinerate Russian cities with nuclear warheads. Ike worried how the Russians might react. His Assistant Defense Secretary Donald Quarles actually said "the Russians did us a favor" because they established the precedent that deep space was free and international.

Most US engineers in the space program in 1957 would have graduated high school in the 1930s, but in the media, the schools of the 1950s took the hit for Sputnik. Ike was quite puzzled by this.

Schools alone can close the achievement gap. This is codified in the disaster known as No Child Left Behind. Most of the differences come from family and community variables and many out-of-school factors, especially summer loss. Some studies have found that poor children enter school behind their middle class peers, learn as much during the year and then lose it over the summer. They fall farther and farther behind and schools are blamed. Middle class and affluent kids do not show summer loss.

Money doesn't matter. Tell this to wealthy districts. Money clearly affects changes in achievement although levels of achievement are more influenced by the variables just mentioned. Most studies are short term and look only at test scores, a very foolish mistake. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger also found investments in school show a payoff in terms of long-term earnings of graduates.

The United States is losing its competitive edge. China and India ARE Rising. As economies collapsed all around it, China's economy grew a remarkable 7% last year. On just humanitarian grounds, we should not wish China and India to remain poor forever, but the more they grow the more money they have to buy stuff from us. As China and India prosper, we prosper. The World Economic Forum and the Institute for Management Development have consistently ranked the U. S. economy as the most competitive in the world. Education is only one part of multi-factor systems in rankings. WEF is especially keen on innovation. Our obsession with testing makes testing a great instrument for destroying creativity.

The U. S. has a shortage of scientists, mathematicians and engineers. This was a myth started oddly enough by the National Science Foundation in the 1980s in a study with assumptions so absurd the study was never published, but the myth lingers on. In fact, Hal Salzman of the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University found that we have three newly minted scientists and engineers who are permanent residents or native citizens for every newly minted job. Within 2 years, 65% of them were no longer in scientific or engineering fields. That proportion might have fallen during the current debacle when people are more likely to hang on to a job even if they hate it. An article in the September 18 Wall Street Journal reported that before the economy collapsed, 30% of the graduates of MIT--MIT--headed directly into finance.

Merit pay for teachers will improve performance. Bebchuk & Fried Pay Without Performance. Adams, Heywood & Rothstein, Teachers, Performance Pay, and Accountability. Bonus pay is concentrated in finance, insurance, and real estate. In most of private sector hard to determine and often leads to corruption and gaming the system. Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort the social processes it is intended to monitor."

The fastest growing jobs are all high-tech and require postsecondary education. "Postsecondary education" is a weasel word. A majority of the fastest growing jobs do, in fact, require some kind of postsecondary training. But, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they account for very few jobs. It's the Walmarts and Macdonald's of America that generate the jobs. According to the BLS, the job of retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing jobs combined.

Test scores are related to economic competitiveness. We do well on international comparisons of reading, pretty good on one international comparison of math and science, and not so good on another math/science comparison. But these comparisons are based on the countries' average scores and average scores don't mean much. The Organization for Economic Cooperating and Development, the producer of the math science comparison in which we do worst has pointed out that in science the U. S. has 25% of all the highest scoring students in the entire world, at least the world as defined by the 60 countries that participate in the tests. Finland might have the highest scores, but that only gives them 2,000 warm bodies compared to the U. S. figure of 67,000. It's the high scorers who are most likely to become leaders and innovators. Only four nations have a higher proportion of researchers per 1000 fulltime employees, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand and Japan. Only Finland is much above the U. S.

Consider Japan, the economic juggernaut of the 1980's. It kids score well on tests and people made a causal link between scores and Japan's economy. But Japan's economy has been in the doldrums for almost a whole generation. Its kids still ace tests.

Education itself produces jobs. President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan have both linked any economic recovery to school improvement. This is nonsense. There are parts of India where thousands of educated people compete for a single relatively low-level white-collar job. Some of you might recall that in the 1970's many sociologists and commentators worried that America was becoming TOO educated, that they would be bored by the work available.

Slain principal's widow joins Red Hook charter school fight

BY RACHEL MONAHAN DAILY NEWS WRITER

Thursday, February 14th 2008, 4:00 AM

Public School 15's former principal - gunned down while searching for a student - would have fought a plan to put a charter school into the Red Hook institution, his widow told the Daily News Wednesday.

"When the school was down and out, the only person who cared about it was my husband," said Madeline Daly, 61, of her husband, Patrick Daly. "He was a hands-on person. He was responsible for the school. I don't think he would be too happy to share it. I wouldn't want anything to change the status of that school or the name of the school," she said of the school, now named in his honor.

A former colleague of Patrick Daly contacted her about parents and teachers angry over the charter school proposal, urging her to go public.

"They were hoping I could work a miracle," she said.

Patrick Daly was killed after getting caught in crossfire between two drug-dealing gangs 15 years ago while looking for a student in a nearby housing project.

PAVE Academy founder Spencer Robertson continued to hope that the school could find a home at PS 15.

"My belief is that as an educator, [Daly] would want to see the school that now bears his name providing an outstanding education to as many children as possible," he said in a statement.

The Sullivan Street school scored an A on its city report card, outperforming some of Brooklyn's best schools.

PS 15 Principal Peggy Wyns-Madison warned at a packed parents meeting Tuesday night that the changes could affect the school's small class size. Wyns-Madison also said smaller classes - no more than 24 students - were the reason the school has been so successful.

But Education Department officials noted yesterday that enrollment had declined in recent years - by 70 students since 2005, nearly as many as would be added in the first year of the charter school.

"We are committed to working with the principal at PS 15 to ensure that her class size is disrupted as little as possible, if at all," said Education Department spokeswoman Melody Meyer

Slain Principal Still a Driving Spirit; A Year Later, Patrick Daly's School Survives and Thrives

By JOE SEXTON

Published: Sunday, December 19, 1993

The first thing they did a year ago at Public School 15, upon hearing word that the principal had been shot dead, was shut the doors. The killing of Patrick Daly was enough violation for the school in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The Sullivan Street entrance was first, then the exits on Wolcott and Van Brunt and Richards, the four corners of a tiny universe in peril.

No television cameras were allowed in to seek sound bites of heartbreak. The damage would be limited. What was alive and vital inside would be preserved.

"We were worried about the integrity of the building," said Mary Manti, the assistant principal, who has since succeeded Mr. Daly. The doors opened the next day, and 12 months after a senseless killing that threatened the worlds of nearly 1,000 children, that integrity remains intact.

One can still walk in any direction from the faded bloodstain on Center Mall in the Red Hook Houses and trace the lines of devastation. Madeline Daly still won't talk publicly about her husband's death. Florence Russell, the mother of one of the three young men sentenced to long prison terms for the killing, replays the events with as much anguish as anyone else. Many children are still haunted by the memory.

But perhaps the greatest truth a year later is that P.S. 15 has endured, and however cruel and heartbreaking the loss of the man, the legacy he left seems much bigger.

"The unthinkable happened: a meteor hit our school," Ms. Manti said. "And who could believe a school would have to face that?"

"The school is not the same," she said. "No school could or should be. Schools change. It's what they do. But I believe we have had a miraculous year. And we have changed in a very wonderful way."

That growth, with its aches and revelations, passed a milestone on Friday as a memorial Mass was held at Visitation Roman Catholic Church in Red Hook to commemorate the anniversary of Mr. Daly's last day. The 48-year-old principal was killed in a gunfight between teen-agers as he searched the neighborhood for a 9-year-old who had left the building that morning.

"If fear isn't the right word, then there certainly was apprehension after Pat's death," said William Casey, the superintendent for District 15. "It was impossible for any of us to know the toll it would take. But one of the spectacular things about the man and what he accomplished was that there was such direction to his plans. When he was killed, no one had to stop and ask where we went from here."

And so an ambitious program of integrating special-education students into general-education classes is in its inaugural year. And a conflict-resolution effort, teaching children to resolve disputes without violence, has been rethought and expanded, the children asked to carry its principles to their homes.

Paintings by third graders, the dividends of a hard-fought struggle to have a Studio in the School program financed for the first time, hang with an unpolished magnificence in the art room. The community programs run out of the school's basement -- job training, after-school care -- conduct themselves in intimate and affectionate coordination with P.S. 15.

Reading and math scores at the predominantly minority school went up last year. The hallways are spotless and hushed, the classrooms warmed by the soft electric hum of children at work.

As a result of a Dinkins administration initiative, P.S. 15 was designated one of the city's beacon schools and serves as a six-day-a-week, 12-hour-a-day community headquarters. Health workers, Girl Scouts, parents and organizers all swing through its doors. 'Simply Too Precious'

"There is a lot of anger still about the media coverage of Mr. Daly's death," said JoEllen Lynch, the director of the Red Hook Community Center. And the atmosphere "is pretty emotionally fragile," she said.

"The focus was on drugs and violence and another maligning of Red Hook. Our kids, the school's kids, again had to deal with this great perception that their community, their lives, were worthless. And the kids are simply too precious to have to deal with that. They are trying so very hard to grow up."

Mickey Correa, 11, still lives the pain of the process. Like other children and teachers and administrators, he sees a man round a corner and feels his heart race. He sees someone standing or leaning a certain way, that peculiar way the kinetic Mr. Daly did, and he begins to sprint. He stops, of course. But the sixth grader said he doesn't cry so much. Mickey, after all, read his own poem, "Time to Move On," on May 27, the day that P.S. 15 was officially renamed the Patrick F. Daly School.

"In the world right now there is nothing, but he wanted kids to keep struggling," Mickey said in a hallway last week. "He didn't want us to leave education."

Malik Jones, a sixth grader, was tempted to take a break from school this year. He said he didn't have homework when he did. He told his mother that school didn't feel the same. Malik, whose apartment in the Red Hook Houses overlooks the spot where Mr. Daly fell, watched yet another television program with film clips of urban violence and end with his principal's death.

Toni Jones studied her son. She had come to Red Hook with him years before and wound up joining him after school at P.S. 15 in a program to earn her general equivalency diploma. It had been Mr. Daly's idea, and when it had come time to take the test and the Government checks had been exhausted, the principal had shown up with a bag of tokens and $20. Ms. Jones is now an emergency medical technician. Socks in Big Shoes

"I told Malik to remember the gifts Mr. Daly had given him, to walk with those gifts, to carry them in his hands," Ms. Jones said. "The school was there; the teachers were. And Ms. Manti has been unbelievable. Mr. Daly left her big shoes to fill. But she's got some socks in there."

For her part, Ms. Manti wants no extra credit. She has 26 years in at P.S. 15, and she is doing as she and her predecessor always did. She says she feels his absence in the late afternoon when he might have made her a cup of tea and laughed about the day's events. But she feels him with her, with an instinctive, reinforcing instructiveness, whenever there is an education decision to be executed or a phone call to a parent to be made.

"People ask me about following in the footsteps of a saint," Ms. Manti said, smiling. "And they just don't understand. You see, I walked next to him when he was alive. There were no footprints to follow. All I had to do was keep walking."

Florence Russell walks through many days numbed by the events of a year ago. Her son is in prison. Her hopes are modest, even minimal.

"God is going to get everyone through it," she said from Florida before hanging up the telephone.

Jermaine Russell, who will be eligible for parole in 2012, is at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Washington County, N.Y. He is in the barbering and beauty culture program. He calls his sister on Staten Island every day.

"In the beginning, he talked about Mr. Daly, but not so much anymore," said the sister, who spoke on the condition that her first name not be used. "He said he'd like to apologize to anyone, everyone. Mr. Daly was his principal. He was mine. He knew my whole family by their first name. He used to stand in the afternoons talking with my grandparents. If any of us had been able to see the future, see what happened, no one would have believed it then."

Disbelief still overcomes P.S. 15 occasionally. But it always surrenders to belief -- in the school, in its durability, in the building with its open doors. John Staniszewski, a music teacher in his first year at P.S. 15, calls the environment at the school "beyond anything I could have imagined or expected at a New York City public school."

When that school let out on Monday afternoon, Ms. Manti, ankle-deep in slush, held a child's hand in hers. She took the child home and then couldn't get back fast enough to the squat, not exactly unworn building. She walked past its murals, including the one in progress that will depict Mr. Daly.

"There is a spirit in the building the same as there is a spirit in a person," Ms. Manti said. "I ask myself all the time, do I still feel it? I do. And others tell me they do, as well. The anniversary is a very important time here. And for all the right reasons."

Photos: One year after the shooting death of Patrick Daly, above (NBC News), the principal of Public School 15 in Brooklyn, the school has endured and has been renamed in honor of Mr. Daly. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times); His widow, Madeline Daly, center front, joined teachers, pupils and parents at a memorial service on Friday in Red Hook. (Nancy Siesel/The New York Times) (pg. 45); "The school is not the same," said Mary Manti, the principal of Public School 15 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, who took over after Patrick F. Daly was killed. With her was Mickey Correa, 11, who read his own poem at the renaming of the school in honor of Mr. Daly. (Ruby Washington/The New York Times) (pg. 50) Map shows the location of the Red Hook Houses. (pg. 50)

It has been acknowledged that our national educational system is in crisis. Unfortunately, there are few critics focusing on the real causes because it is not popular to do so. Instead, the focus has been on poor teachers, the need for more money for education, large class sizes, too much testing, and substandard schools. Some of the solutions proposed have been to identify and weed out the bad teachers, increase teacher salaries and include merit pay, provide teachers with more professional development and resources, have smaller class sizes and smaller schools, less testing and larger school budgets.The reality is that time and experience have shown that these are not the root causes and solutions for improving education.

The idea that there are so many poor teachers nationally is unrealistic.In any profession, there is a small percentage of individuals who are not performing to standards.In the teaching profession, it takes three years to achieve tenure (NYS). During this probationary period, a teacher can be dismissed if he/she is not up to the school's standards. Therefore, it is not realistic to claim there are so many poor teachers in the system, resulting in poor student performance.

Teachers attempt to do the best they can each day in the environment they find themselves in. Unfortunately, the environment in too many cases is not conducive to teaching and learning. Factors that impede the teaching -learning process include poor student discipline, poor student work habits, lack of student effort in class work, home work and studying, poor student attendance, and lack of administrative support.

The problem is that society has embraced an entitlement philosophy that abstains from any personal responsibility for its behaviors and actions.This idea has infected our school system in that if a student is not learning, it must be the fault of others. The student is entitled to an education, why isn't he getting it? Unfortunately, administrators play the game and blame teachers for academic performance and behavioral choices of students. If a teacher has discipline problems in the classroom, he/she is a weak teacher. If a teacher has poor student attendance, the teacher's lessons must be boring.If a teacher fails too many students based on their poor attendance and performance, the teacher is the focus of scrutiny. Therefore, teachers are intimidated and play the game of pretending students are succeeding by passing them.

Many people do not think through the teaching-learning process.We don't consider that learning is acquired through mastery,which requires hard work and effort. A teacher instructs and guides, while the student engages by applying effort in learning the subject matter.It is a two way street. If the student does not put the necessary effort into the subject matter, learning will be limited.In addition, in order to master a subject, homework and studying are necessary. Too many have the erroneous view that it all happens in the classroom.

Yet teachers are held responsible for student learning whether students put effort in to their work or not.The critics say that teachers must motivate their students to learn. However, when push comes to shove, students will only learn through hard work in developing reading, writing and thinking skills. Unfortunately, too many students are not willing to work hard to be successful no matter what the motivation is.Why do it the hard way when many know that in this entitlement model, they will succeed regardless, through social promotions, teacher grade inflation, credit recovery, easier and grade inflated standardized exams, summer school, GED's, etc. Learning is not the objective, moving through the system is.The result is that more students will graduate as functional illiterates, unprepared for college or the work place.For example,about 75% of NYC students require remedial courses when applying to Community Colleges and the two year graduation rate is horrendous.

Education will not improve until we face the root cause which I have outlined. However, this discussion doesn't take place since it is not politically correct and makes us feel very uncomfortable because we have to point the finger at ourselves and our children.We would rather scapegoat our teachers and politicians and play more of the "blame game." However, until we acknowledge the root cause, we will be unable to focus on real solutions that will lead to real improvements in education.

A recent TV ad from the Fund for Public Schools, which Bloomberg founded to funnel private money into public schools, cites Evander Childs High School as an example of a "turnaround school."

It compares five successful small schools with the massive Bronx behemoth they replaced.

One principal proudly boasts in the ad that the graduation rate has increased to 80% from 30%.

A closer look shows that in 2005, only 11% of ninth-graders entering Evander were reading at grade level, the study claims.

At the same time, 30% of students entering the small replacement schools were proficient in reading, significantly higher than the boroughwide average.

"We cannot make sense of large differences in the graduation rates at Evander and the small schools which replaced it without taking these differences in who entered the schools into account," said study co-author Aaron Pallas, a Teachers College professor.

The same is true, on average, of all of the students who attend the new small schools that have replaced the roughly 20 large high schools that have been closed since 2002.

Students entering the new schools were between 10 and 15 percentage points more likely to be reading and doing math at grade level, as measured by state tests.

They also were less likely to be special education students, more likely to be female and more likely to qualify for free lunch.

The study also suggests that the lower-performing students who would have gone to the large schools that were closed end up in other nearby large high schools.

"One in three students were graduating, and now three in four are, despite the fact that they are disproportionately high needs students."

"This is a reform that has changed the lives of thousands of students," said John White, acting deputy chancellor.

Meanwhile, city Controller William Thompson criticized Bloomberg Tuesday night in a speech laying out his own education policy, saying the Education Department has fudged numbers to boost graduation rates and test scores.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Also, inquiring minds note the sleight of hand that redefines the cohort by looking at kids who stay enrolled K-8. This eliminates all the lottery winners who were weeded out and/or had needs the charters were unable or unwilling to address.

JMB

At 01:31 PM 9/22/2009 -0400, you wrote:

Lots of PR spin about the new charter school study by Caroline Hoxby. No quote from any possible critic or skeptic except in Daily news article. Nor is there any mention of following facts in any of the articles:1- Hoxby is a very controversial figure , a conservative economist, who has been accused of skewing her analyses before to benefit the notion of vouchers and charters. See this controversy sparked by her pro-voucher study of school quality based on whether they were near "streams": http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=508253 (this story, coincidentally, was written by Javier Hernandez as undergraduate at Harvard, before he was hired by the NY Times.)2- One of the prime advantages of most charters, if they do indeed show better results, is their smaller classes. In NYC, this results from the fact that DOE has allowed them to cap enrollment and class size at far lower levels than most regular public schools in NYC.3- it is difficult if not impossible to figure out how much of the advantage at charter schools, in addition to smaller class size, might be due to "peer effects"; ie charter school students are surrounded by other students from more motivated families, who know they can be kicked out at any sign of slacking off or disciplinary trouble. This is certainly not the case in regular public schools; where the students who "lose" the charter school lotteries are surrounded by students from less motivated households, who are also less afraid of being forced out of school for bad behavior or poor performance. Thus, whether the entire comparison is fair is quite debatable.From: Feinberg MargeSent: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 10:02 AMTo: &News ClippingsSubject: Daily News Clips

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

INDEX

Study Shows Better Scores for Charter School Students

New York Times

Students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not secure charter school seats, according to a study by a Stanford University economist being released Tuesday.

Charter schools, which are privately run but publicly financed, have been faring well on standardized tests in recent years. But skeptics have discounted their success by accusing them of “creaming” the best students, saying that the most motivated students and engaged parents are the ones who apply for the spots.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Annenberg Institute for School ReformEducation Policy for Action Series

Education Challenges Facing New York CityNew York City's Small Schools Experiment:Who's Benefiting?

Nowhere has the approach of restructuring large comprehensive high schools been implemented as broadly as in New York City. Since 2000, 27 large comprehensive high schools have been closed and reopened as campuses of small schools. Do the students who attend the new schools have different characteristics, on average, than students in other schools in the city or in the schools they replaced?

A research presentation by Jennifer Jennings and Aaron Pallas of Columbia University will be followed by commentary from Eloise Messineo, Principal of Brandeis High School, and Ana Maria Archila, Co-Director of Make the Road New York, and on open discussion with parents, teachers, students, principals, organizers, advocates, scholars, and policymakers.

Well put on a sundress and sing me a show song! Newt Gingrich, his pal the Reverend Al Sharpton and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are teaming up to push for the ‘reformation American education’. The ménage de trois will saddle up and begin a whirlwind tour starting at the end of September and they will be pushing Arne’s great Race to the Top and of course charter schools, the Trojan horse for the privatizers and the liquid center of the Great Race.

Interviewed on NBC’s Today show Friday the 14th of August, Gingrich and Sharpton spoke of bi-partisanship and “putting everyone’s hands on the table.” It might be a good idea to require that they be placed palms up, just to be safe. Gingrich even went so far as to call education a “civil rights issue” and echoed the familiar themes often heard about the need to prepare students for competition in a global capitalist world. Gingrich on civil rights? Education Secretary Arne Duncan is also joining forces with the dynamic duo to bankroll the new charters (he’s got ten billion to play with from various and sundry federal programs) and encourage and push cities to fix failing schools, or so he says. As if the cities had the money to even fix sidewalks, let alone schools. After almost thirty years of neglect, the cities, not to mention their mostly urban schools, centers of obedience training and tethered as they are to the carpet loom of rigid standardized testing, are literally falling apart. But don’t tell that to the Rat Pack. According to NewsMax:

The trio will visit Philadelphia, New Orleans and Baltimore later this year. They plan to add more stops as their tour progresses.

“These are cities that have real challenges but also tremendous hope and opportunity,” Duncan told reporters on a conference call Thursday.

Maybe Duncan will get the opportunity to meet with the FBI when he’s in Philly, where at least five Philadelphia-area charter schools are under investigation, their control of public funds, handling of financial accounting and managerial oversight have been criminally called into question. Federal authorities are right now adding investigative and legal resources to the criminal probe as this is being written. School Matters notes that:

People familiar with the matter say the list includes New Media Technology Charter School, with campuses in Germantown and Stenton; Germantown Settlement Charter School in Germantown; Northwood Academy in the Northeast; and Agora Cyber Charter School in Devon, which provides online instruction to 4,400 students statewide (School Matters, August 27, 2009).

The trio will eventually burrow its way into New Orleans, another pit stop on the whistle tour. There, disaster capitalism is boosting charter school CEO pay after decimating the teachers union, the way the ‘reform’ was designed. In New Orleans, disaster capitalism’s first educational reform experiment, corporate school mercenaries under the direction of autocrats Paul Pastorak and Paul Vallas (Arne’s old boss in Chicago), operate with little or no oversight and little community participation. CEO Principals hire and fire at will without any protections for teachers. Similar pay boosts for administrative personnel were just announced in Los Angeles where the school board handed over 250 charter schools to the “new providers”, in face of opposition from teachers and parents.

While the kids are uniformed and uninformed and the teacher’s shackled and harnessed to the inauthentic tests, according to the Times-Picayune CEO pay is rising:

At the top of the pay range sits veteran Kathy Riedlinger, head of Lusher Charter School, who earns $203,556, including a $5,000 yearly car allowance. Lafayette Charter School’s Mickey Landry, recruited from a prep school in a national search, is No.A2 at $186,000

This is the Wal Mart model of education, where teachers become ‘associates’ student become ‘consumers’, unions are despised and any effort to organize them immediately thwarted, and it unfortunately this reform seems to be spreading to almost every major city in the country and at incredible speed. Thanks to Arne Duncan.

There is little doubt that the gang will be chauffeured to various charter schools and then scattered amongst rehearsed classrooms. Images of the three patting eight year old student heads while a smiling administrator and grinning teacher stand in the background will be cast to the public and perhaps one or all of the three ‘reformers’ can inquire of little Johnny or Maria or Shareka how they feel about the need to get an education in the rush to compete with China and India. The group might also take the opportunity to meet with some of the ‘strong players’ in the business of turning around schools, like Green Dot Public Schools in LA or Alliance Schools. We also mustn’t forget about the meetings with unions and their members in an effort to convince them they are drafting a future that includes the beleaguered teachers while the true intent of the Sicarios remains hidden under their garments.

Overshadowed by two wars, a corporate financed health care debate, economic crisis and swelling unemployment, social unrest and reality TV, a discussion of educational policy is virtually impossible under the current corporate media command. Unacceptable to most American citizens the current educational system is being radically disassembled like Legos in a pre-school play room. In its stead is being built a new corporate educational model. The water bag has burst, the EMO’s are like kids scrambling for candy under a broken piñata. It is truly astounding.

Duncan, of course, is spearheading the campaign to sell the charter school snake oil to the public. It’s like an old traveling medicine show equipped with elixirs and potions for every ailment but Duncan’s the guy with the bankroll, the go to guy. He has close ties to billionaires: Eli Broad, Gates, the Walton family and other philanthropic interests who have for years looked forward to this moment to step in and control the design and organizational structure of American education. Maybe while he’s in Los Angeles, where 250 schools were simply given over to “outside operators” he’ll find a little time away from his soap box tour to spend a few minutes at the Eli Broad Superintendents Academy that prepares non-educators like Duncan for Superintendent positions in urban schools while the Broad Foundation trains works side by side with ‘associates’ of skilled executives in various fields for leading urban school systems (School Administrator, August 2007). There, he can listen to the voices of experienced, proven leaders from business, military, civic and government sectors sharing ideas with their non-educator counterparts on how to privatize and reform education. Even Newt and Sharpton might enjoy the challenge.

The hyperbole and hypocrisy of Arne Duncan

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is asking America to hand over its public school system to outside providers and non profit and for profit educational maintenance organizations (EMO’s) in an attempt to regiment education, clean up management and tie the whole mess to performance outcomes on NCLB under the euphemism Race to the Top. What about Duncan’s education successes in Chicago where he was CEO of schools. Shouldn’t we critically examine them to see if Arne is on the right track? It sure doesn’t seem like it; in Chicago Arne created more like a race to the bottom and the statistics are dismal.

In a report released in July of this year Titled “Still Left Behind,” and put out by Duncan’s former bosses, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club, in Chicago public schools:

Half of the students drop out by high school, and of those who remain until 11th grade, 70% fail to meet state standards, the report says. In fact, “In the regular (non-magnet) neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college.” The report directly challenges widespread claims by current and former CPS officials that local students have shown substantial progress over the last decade on standardized tests. For instance, it notes a 2006 letter from then schools CEO Arne Duncan, now U.S. secretary of education, stating that the share of CPS students meeting or exceeding state standards had leapt 15 points in one year (”Still Left Behind: Student Learning in Chicago Public Schools”).

Purporting to be gloomy and indeed it was, the Chicago Civic Committee actually seemed to relish the poor test results. It seems that even though Arne’s seven year tenure as CEO of Chicago schools did nothing for students even if you accept NCLB and the state mandated tests, the committee spokesman, Mr. Martin, did not hesitate to say he would not call the entire school-reform process a failure. Why? Largely because the ‘reform’ also sparked the formation of more charter and ‘innovative schools’, schools that according to the report perform better than CPS schools. Ah, and there we have it, the report is evidence of Arne’s success; Arne did do his job and he did it well, traditional schools fail in Chicago and charter schools gain fame. The public schools become secondary providers that struggle to compete with philanthropic and taxpayer subsidized charter schools, now the primary providers. The game isn’t even fair, the schools are being set up for failure by NCLB and its absurd assessment; they have no chance to compete with the new EMO’s anxious to kick down the barn door and register as many ‘subprime’ kids as they can for the monies they get. Take a look at the set-up and how it is supposed to work according to the conservative Hudson Institute.

In their Winter 2008 issue of Education Next, the publication laid out in no uncertain terms the ‘game plan’ charter advocates are employing to takeover public education nationwide:

Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering’s way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75%. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, non-district authorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political climate (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition)… The solution is not an improved traditional district; it’s an entirely different delivery system… Charter advocates should strive to have every urban public school be a charter (Smarick, 2008).

Sure, and there are all kinds of players and gamers just giddy with glee for the chance to burst into the burgeoning privatization of a $750 billion dollar educational industry as many call it. Take Entertainment Properties Inc., for example; this is a company known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries. Guess what? They recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for about $170 million. The real estate investment trust acts as landlord, while Imagine operates the schools and is using the investment to expand its chain of 74 locations. As School Matters recently noted, Barry Sharp, chief financial officer for Arlington, Va.-based Imagine was quoted as saying:

They really are an effective source of long-term financing that we can rely on and enables us to do what we’re best at, which is running schools, and do what they’re best at, which is long-term real estate ownership. It’s a good fit. Focusing on large players who know how to operate schools, hire teachers and develop a curriculum provides the company a more dependable return (School Matters, September 12, 2009).

That’s what Arne, Sharpton and Gingrich will be really trying to accomplish as odd-bedfellows. When scrutinized under the financial lens of profits to be made and power to be had they aren’t really that odd at all. What these three men represent are public relation warriors in the final march to completely revolutionize public education by creating a new class of primary for-profit and non-profit providers beholden largely to mayoral control of cities and corporate control by Wall Street.

When you think about charter schools you are supposed to assume they are community based ‘small schools’ designed by committed parents and teachers. For the most part they are not. They are large institutional players with briefcases full of cash and a rolodex that would make a Hollywood agent blush with envy. The mom and pop charter schools that come to the public mind will never be able to compete with the large non-profit and for-profit driven EMOs. The focus is on large players, remember, the ‘made guys’?

Yet when the rubber hits the road and the trio finally makes their way across the expansive nation of ‘American exceptionalism’ and you tune into the rancid rhetoric of the trolips and strumpets, that’s not what you’ll hear. They’ll be in rare form to be sure, utilizing towering and lofty rhetoric clothed in the need to boost inauthentic test scores and how education is failing America in the 21st century. The language will resonate with themes about how “competition being good for raising all boats” is the answer to drop-out rates and underachievement and you’ll be treated to the hostile rhetoric that “teacher unions are greedy and their pay and performance must be tied to the NCLB state-based testing regime” — all in the name of the kids.

This was all confirmed when NPR had Gingrich and Sharpton on the air on September 12th and the puppeteering was as palpable as the reporting was pitiful. It’s the word ‘reform’; nobody bothers to ask what it means and what it would look like so sophists like Gingrich, Duncan and Sharpton don’t have to get into the muck of providing any details.

Never mind the facts, according to NewsMax the idea for the dog and pony show came from a meeting the three musketeers had with President Barack Obama in May 2009, while at the White House. How nice! If you think bipartisanship is working with the national health debate just wait until you see this new level of courtesanship in the name of our nation’s kids. And this ‘debate’ hasn’t really even started, if one was to watch the national news. Lost in the headlines of ‘deathers’, ‘tenthers’, ‘tea-baggers’ and ‘birthers’ are our nation’s urban children, usually Black and Latino whom are forced to attend dilapidated schools in ghettos dimmed by poverty and drop-out rates that call the whole notion of ‘schooling’ into question.

But don’t worry, Arnie, Al and Newt will provide the needed answers and the suckling private sector will count the body bags of kids and do the math and accounting and set up an entire new non-profit, quasi profitized educational system – a national retail chain of charter schools started by noble entrepreneurs, free market fundamentalists, philanthro-capitalists and valiant non-profiteers who wish to assure the ‘kids’ are prepared for the challenges of global capitalism and the need to compete with India and China, as new economic engines of competition. Ask Bill Gates, he’s got his billions in play to “reform” education (see Tough Choices or Tough Times); so does the Walton Family and the Eli Broad Foundation, among other philanthropists looking to leverage their pirated loot to destroy teacher unions, impose merit pay on teachers and administrators, contract out good paying public jobs, lengthen the working day and entice starry eyed Teach for America recruits to be the new ‘associates’ in the whole new business arrangement where the average teacher lasts three years before leaving the profession.

Who pays for it all? You as the taxpayer will pay for the new retail educational chains with your tax monies that will be transferred from traditional public schools to the new EMO’s and the charters they will manage, many of the schools gussied up and going by such blue-blooded names as Academies or Preparatory Schools. This, we are told will help the traditional schools ‘compete’ – sound familiar? Only the words are false, the real idea as the Hudson Institute stated is to make the traditional public schools the secondary providers of education reducing the public sphere and turning over the primary provider role to the new ‘turnaround artists’, the business school grads like Arnie who never taught in a classroom or designed a lesson plan. Neo-liberalism is the economic theory and privatization is one of the first orders of the day, that and deregulation, concentration of power, surveillance and authoritarianism.

Sharpton the Sharpee

So what do the three stooges bring to the debate over education? Nothing, really. Sharpton commented on NBC:

The parents need to be challenged with the message of `no excuses (NewsMax, August 14, 2009).

No excuses for what, Al? As if poverty, Wall Street theft, deregulation of the ‘free market’, the privatization of almost every sphere of life, a lack of affordable and reliable health care, decimated public transportation, lack of a living wages, infant mortality rates creeping close to third world countries, devastated urban areas with increased incarceration rates, gentrification, foreclosures and jobs shipped overseas for cheap labor are working people’s fault? Kevin Phillips writes in his book Bad Money that after tax income per year for the lowest 20% of the population at the end of the 1970’s was $9,300, adjusted for inflation. At the end of the 1990’s it fell to $8,700 in inflation adjusted dollars. The middle class did no better, during the same period of time and using the same criteria they saw their income rise from $31,800 at the end of the 1970’s to $33,200 at the end of the 1990’s. Meanwhile during the same period and using the same after tax, inflation driven number, the highest 1% of the population saw their earnings rise from $256,000 to a whopping $644,000 during the same period (Bad Money). It is this top one percent that now wants to control, manage and design education for all the other Americans.

Foaming at the mouth about individualism and personal responsibility as the system grinds slowly to a halt and new tent cities are constructed weekly seems to sit well with the Reverend who reportedly earns $750,000 a year hosting a syndicated radio talk show and collects anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 per lecture and $2,000 per church sermon. On top of that, Sharpton does “consulting” work for corporations. Business is good, very good and now, bound to get even better with his new-found courtship and oath of Omerta.

Yet it’s important to remember that Sharpton recently had his own little “teachable moment” when it comes to ‘excuses’ and personal responsibility; last July the feds went after him for not paying his taxes. No-excuses, pull em’ up by your boot straps, Sharpton cut a deal with federal prosecutors in Brooklyn to end a longstanding criminal probe of his finances that reportedly encompassed his personal fortune, his opportunistic and self-aggrandizing 2004 presidential campaign spending and the National Action Network, his so-called ‘advocacy’ group. Sharpton quickly cut the deal whining that he’d personally pay back $1 million, including $500,000 upfront, as part of the settlement. However that didn’t get him out of all the hot water. In March of this year, according to the New York Post, Sharpton also owed $884,669 to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, which was not part of the July settlement; this according to two liens covering years 2002 through 2006. $500,000 up front is a lot of money for a guy under criminal investigation for tax fraud; where would he get that kind of cash?

Sharpton Gets the Cash!

As I reported in a three part series in Counterpunch and as was also reported in the New York Daily News by award winning investigative journalist, Juan Gonzalez in an article, entitled “Rev. Al Sharpton’s 500G link to education reform” Sharpton’s involvement in the new bipartisan march to charterized our nation’s schools could have been a script from a Hollywood movie – with its attention to financial wheeling and dealing, skilled manipulation, personal gain, payoffs through third party intermediaries, front groups, cronyism and rigged public relations campaigns and events designed to influence and manipulate public sentiment on matters of educational policy.

What Gonzalez was able to uncover is that Sharpton’s own organization, The National Action Network, was immediately paid $500,000 for Sharpton’s consent to endorse, involve and partner himself with Joel Klein to launch the new Education Equality Project, a group favoring New York charterization. The cash no doubt was timely as Sharpton had promised the government $500,000 down in the tax settlement deal, quite handy and timely to cut the deal with the prosecutors pursing the good Reverend. However, the story gets even more bizarre.

It appears that to avoid any publicity over the ‘pay for play’ payment that Sharpton received for his alliance with Joel Klein in erecting the new Education Equality Project (EEP), the $500,000 intended for Sharpton’s group was covertly funneled to Sharpton’s National Action Network by Plainfield Asset Management, LLC, a Connecticut hedge fund. As the story progressed, I asked myself: ‘Why was an asset management company chosen to make a payoff to Al Sharpton’s group?’ Perhaps the best motivation could be found in the fact that the former Chancellor of New York Schools, Harold Levy, is currently the managing director of Plainfield Asset Management and a registered lobbyist for the firm. If there are any students reading, “Have you learned anything yet?” The whole sordid affair is malodorous, but it is not surprising. It is all about public relations now, sophistry and propaganda of the first order and who best to convince the poor, Black and Latino working families that the new charter schools will be good for their kids?

Gingrich the predator

What’s the role of Gingrich in all this, you might ask? Besides his character as a throne sniffer and his proclivity for self-aggrandizement and self-promotion, Gingrich has a significant role in the whole scenario. To begin with he represents the Wall Street business interests and the entrepreneurs and philanthropists who pay him. William Gates Sr., for example, worked for Preston Gates, a big law firm and lobbying group that hired Jack Abramoff as a lobbyist. Abramoff is known to have had strong ties to Gingrich. At this point we do not have any idea if Gates Sr. or Bill Gates for that matter has any ties to Newt. But Gingrich brings more than just political and financial ties from his disgraceful see-saw days in Washington where he oversaw the gutting of educational funds. He also brings the managerial doublespeak that so charms the business community. He’ll invoke Peter Drucker rhetoric and speak to organizational inefficiencies and he’ll talk about cutting costs in education, managerial efficiencies, cost containment, outsourcing, measured outcomes, and the need for No Child Left Behind to assess the future of our nation’s children and of course, he’ll highlight the theory of failing teachers and their unions. Gingrich will be posing for the FOX news listeners, Ruppert Murdoch’s little curmudgeons and he’ll do a fine job of convincing them that the road is being paved with gold and the future of our children is bright with new competitive spirit.

Newt calls public schools a “monopoly of failure,” pinning the blame for the decline of public education at “departments of education, schools of education, and unionized bureaucracy.” He argues that people from any of his three culpable camps are inherently corrupted by their stake in the failed system, and that they will blindly defend that system to protect themselves at the expense of our nation’s children (”Newt Gingrich and Me: A Charged Moment at an Education Blogger Summit Dan Brown,” May 16, 2008 Huffington Post).

But wait, there are more concerns swelling in the neo-cortex of Gingrich. Newt has always been concerned about the liberalism inherent in teaching and the ‘liberal’ curriculum in general. He’s not alone for the Texas State Education Board is set to vote on the first draft of the proposed standards in “United States History Studies Since Reconstruction,” which removes any and all references to liberal politics, according to Chron.com an online news service. The new standards require students “to identify significant conservative organizations and individuals, such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority.” The standards are expected to be adopted along party lines with all 10 Republicans voting in favor of the curriculum. But there’s more: One expert, David Barton, president of Wall Builders, recommended that “…the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be “republican” rather than “democratic,” in the state’s textbooks (Chron.com “History’s first draft: Newt Gingrich but no liberals: Textbooks being written for Texas students appear to lean to the right,” Gary Scharrer, August 20, 2009). Newt will be on hand to rail against the brainwashing of our kids and their ‘civil rights’ to an ‘objective’ education as all part of the big reform.

The Skilled Manipulators and the Hyperbole of Hypocrisy

When thinking about propaganda and its perpetrators, like Gingrich, Sharpton and Arne Duncan, it is important to understand that it is a specific type of message presentation aimed at serving a particular agenda; even if the message conveys true information it still may be partisan and fail to paint a complete picture of an issue or controversy. In their book Propaganda and Persuasion, Dr. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell define propaganda as:

The deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

It is clear that people skilled in the art of Machiavellianism, manipulation and propaganda want to influence the beliefs and behavior of others and they will resort to all kinds of mechanisms to do so. Understanding psychology people like Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan have insight into what makes people vulnerable to manipulation and they use language and images to manage perceptions. As a result, they strive to appear before others in a way that associates themselves with power, authority, expertise and conventional morality. That’s why they’ll parade into communities and grab media headlines.

Key actors in the march towards educational privatization are well aware of this need to control information so when advocating sweeping educational changes such as charter schools or for-profit EMOs, they use ‘rational’ means only when such means can be used to create the appearance of objectivity and reasonability. The key, here, is to understand that the skilled manipulators are always trying to keep some information and some points of view from being given a fair hearing while at the same time promoting their own storyline for dissemination through the corporate dominated press. It is the same tired, shameless behavior we’ve seen when we focus on health care.

None for all and all for none: Ginning up the anti teacher anti public parent base

For those witnessing the health care or health insurance reform issue as it is playing out on the national landscape, they will not be surprised when they begin to see the ‘astro turf’ groups assembled around charter schools emerge, if they haven’t already. This is another reason Arne and the gang are riveted on visiting major cities for they want to be on hand to applaud and cheer on the ‘grass root’ efforts aimed at charterizing a way forward. They need to work on the talking points developed by think tanks and right wing pundits for dissemination to the hoi polloi.

In the case of educational policy analysis, one way to begin to think critically on issues such as charter schools is to rightly focus on the highly vocal educational think tanks that purport to be non-partisan and objective, but in reality are supported by huge economic interests. Within the corridors of these think tanks walk the researchers, scholars and intellectuals that produce research to justify neo-liberal public policies that support charter schools, vouchers and other privatization schemes. Thus, one critical task in the debate over charter schools today is undoubtedly to help people recognize how the wealthy and powerful often prey on the credulity, gullibility, and vulnerability of the poor or poorly schooled in advocating public policies that favor their interests while at the same time avoiding critical public scrutiny. This of course is disconcerting for advocates of public disclosure, public transparency and political democracy in general and surely unacceptable for informed decision making and democratic oversight and governance. Yet this ghastly governance goes on seemingly unabated each and every day; non-disclosure and non-transparency are now more norm than aberration, the media more stenographers than journalists. One of the most insidious and popular efforts in arranging consent generating activities is to start ‘grassroots front groups’, as we’ve seen in the health car town hall fiascos.

Take the group ‘Parent Union’. Steve Barr, the originator of Green Dot Public Schools, a non-profit EMO out of LA, started Parent Union in Los Angeles a few years ago and it’s now spread its reach to Oregon. Although it’s still too premature to conclude, The Parent Union, from what I can understand is not entirely separate from the Parent Revolution, another ‘reform education’ group. In fact, plausible inferences suggest that the Parent Revolution is just the Parent Union’s driving force. Ben Austin, who brought EMO Green Dot Public Schools in for the Locke High School “turnaround,” started the Parent Revolution (Austin, conveniently, is also a city attorney for Los Angeles). The organization seeks to dismantle traditional Los Angeles public schools by getting parents to organize petition drives to have the schools ‘decertified’. The organization boasts at its website:

watch our video and find out how you can transform your child’s school. If 51% of the parents at your school sign the petition demanding a better school, we will guarantee your child a great school, in your neighborhood within three years (Parent Revolution)

This is how Green Dot managed to pull off a hostile takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles, where Duncan and the crew can view the dismal test scores that came out last week, one year after the takeover by Green Dot. Chapters of Parent Revolution are popping up all over the state of California and in the Northwest. Some parents are concerned about what happens after getting the 51%, but what to worry, with the plethora of EMO’s like Barr’s and the candied promises of the managerial elite the gullible have found their answers. The Revolution is funded at least in part by billionaire Eli Broad, but Service Employee International Uunion (SEIU) is also chipping in, making for another set of interesting bedfellows and a discouraging platform for the future. Los Angeles is a mess and doesn’t promise to get better any time soon.

Marco Petruzzi, the President and Chief Executive Officer of Green Dot, is also the head of the Venice chapter of the Parent Union and although there is nothing to indicate he’s getting paid for his work with the parent organization, he’s certainly getting paid by Green Dot. How much? Hard to say for he became CEO in 2008 and the IRS 990 forms for Green Dot only run through 2007. Prior to joining Green Dot, according to their website, Marco founded ‘r3 school solutions’, an organization that provided management and administrative services to charter management organizations, another burgeoning business. Prior to founding r3 school solutions, he was a Partner at Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm. Marco has fifteen years of consulting experience working with top management of major international groups in corporate and product-market strategy, channel management, pricing strategy, commercial organization, operations, R&D management and supply chain management assignments, in the USA, South America, and Europe. Marco also worked at McKinsey & Co. and for Enichem Americas, a petrochemical trading company based in New York (Green Dot Website).

When the LA takeover of 250 schools was passed by a 6-1 vote on the resolution on August 25, 2009, Austin told the Parent Revolution afterwards:

We made history today. All of us are living together in a revolutionary moment. Big, scary, good, revolutionary change is happening right now, and we get to be part of it. We have parents standing together alongside the President of the United States calling for a revolution. That’s exciting. But there are two reasons for us to temper our joy, just a little bit.

First, because we haven’t done anything yet. This resolution — and all the great Parent Revolution organizing in East Los Angeles, Venice, and elsewhere — won’t mean a thing until we transform our first school, and begin the process of giving our children the education they need and the future they deserve. Until we transform that first school and help that first student, we have done nothing. The defenders of the status quo didn’t expect us to move so quickly. Maybe they underestimated us and were caught a little flat-footed. But they aren’t anymore. They now know what we can do, so we must do more. We have to work even harder to actually implement this resolution with parents all across Los Angeles.

Second, we need to be gracious winners. Because our opponents aren’t bad people. They care about kids too. I’ve consumed a tremendous amount of wine with A.J. Duffy and know him to be a smart, funny, nice person. The problem isn’t the people, it’s the system itself. More often than not, if we can change the system, we can work with the people. Even though major elements of organized labor opposed us today, there isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t ultimately be on the same side (Parent Revolution, September 9, 2009 http://www.parentrevolution.org/).

The Gingrich, Sharpton and Duncan show is certainly aimed at influencing and providing gravitas to the new parent insurgents intent on turning their children’s futures over to Wall Street CEO’s and concerned philanthropists and entrepreneurs. They’ll be egged on by the grey-haired and grotesque Gingrich, the lithe and goofy Arne Duncan and the ‘people’s champion and advocate, the Reverend Al Sharpton. Expect to see the three stage managers thronged by eager and justly frustrated parents talking about the platform for education as a ‘civil rights issue’ while fist bumping with the disillusioned and those devastated by more than thirty years of extinction economics.

Detecting the disinformation and dissembling the diatribe

Those of us interested in a democratic debate regarding charter schools, educational reform, privatization, teacher unions, authentic assessment, creative and relevant curriculum and the host of concerns that are currently considered ‘hot bed’ issues within the arena of education want and deserve a public discussion that includes equal coverage of dissenting as well as dominant points of view as they pertain to these controversies. We also do not wish to be seen as feckless fools who can be dominated by verbal rhetoric and propagandists. However, in our current hyper-media environment, controlled as it is by powerful corporate interests bundled up into think tanks, people now need to learn how to detect when some one is trying to manipulate them into believing or doing what they would not believe or do had they access to more information or further reasoning from dissenting points of view. Therefore, in order to assure a healthy debate on issues such as charter schools and educational policy, it is necessary to publicly disclose situations wherein people of wealth and power are manipulating people with little wealth and power, and specifically how the use of language and imagery is used to accomplish these ends. But don’t tell that to Duncan and his conspiratorial counterparts.

In the case of educational policy, one way to begin to think critically on issues such as charter schools is to focus on the highly vocal educational think tanks that purport to be non-partisan and objective, but in reality are supported by huge economic interests. Within the corridors of these think tanks walk the researchers, scholars and intellectuals that produce research to justify neo-liberal public policies that support charter schools, vouchers and other privatization schemes. Thus, one critical task in the debate over charter schools today is undoubtedly to help people recognize how the wealthy and powerful often prey on the credulity, gullibility, and vulnerability of the poor or poorly schooled in advocating public policies that favor their interests while at the same time avoiding critical public scrutiny. This of course is disconcerting for advocates of public disclosure, public transparency and political democracy in general and surely unacceptable for informed decision making and democratic oversight and governance. Yet it goes on seemingly unabated each and every day; non-disclosure and non-transparency are now more norm than aberration.

The Duncan, Gingrich and Sharpton alliance is only the latest in what can only be called disinformation and therefore really a callous disregard for democracy, working people, their communities and the disasters they face. For it is the economic disasters of the last thirty years of neoliberal economic theory and practice that has allowed the Chicago Boys to seize the national debate on everything from health care to education. And although President Obama has stated his opposition to dummied down standardized testing, his advisors and oafs like Duncan, Sharpton and Gingrich continue to forge policy and occupy the geographical debate over education. They have something very different in mind. They need No Child Left Behind not just for the fact that more and more schools are scheduled to fail under the rubric of its testing gallows, but because no NCLB will be one of the chief standards used to measure the performance of the new charter schools, and after all, isn’t that the point?

‘Duncan donuts’ with Arne will prove to be a memorable experience for all concerned with education, from the carpeted cubicles of Wall Street to the disastrous reality of main-street. The only real issue is whether the national media coverage will give a fair hearing to those who have other ideas for preserving and reforming America’s troubled educational systems, ideas that embrace education, participatory democracy and schooling as a moral value, not simply as factories for the manufacture of human products to compete with China. But if the health care debacle is any indication of what may lie in store for the public, look for the skilled manipulators like Duncan, Sharpton and Gingrich to weave tall tales even Paul Bunyan couldn’t hold a candle to and look for the corporate sock puppet press to be the willing stenographers for power they were hired to speak for.

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About Me

Norm Scott worked in the NYC school system from 1967 to 2002, spending 30 of those years teaching elementary school in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (District 14). He retired in July 2002. He has been active in education reform and in the UFT, often as a critic of union policy, since 1970, working with a variety of groups. In 1996 he began publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for teachers attending the UFT Delegate Assembly. In 2002, he expanded the paper into a 16-page tabloid, printing up to 25,000 copies distributed to teacher mailboxes through Ed Notes supporters. Education Notes started publishing a blog in Aug. 2006. Norm also writes the School Scope education column for The Wave, the Rockaway Beach community newspaper.